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This is the first biography of entrepreneur and economist Richard Cantillon whose major work, Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en General (1755), remains one of the most important works on economics written in the 18th century. Using much previously unpublished manuscript material, this study explains the nature of Europe's first stock exchange boom, the South Sea Bubble, and the Mississippi System, and shows how Cantillon's theorizing as an economist interacted with his activities as a banker-entrepreneur to make him one of Europe's wealthiest men in this period of frenetic stock exchange activity.